Hometown News Inc. in Woodruff, S.C., last month ordered an Orient Super 4-Hi tower and an Orient X-Cel 2:2 jaw folder from Printers House Americas LLC. It is the third order the publisher placed with PHA for Orient equipment.

The new tower and folder, which are slated for installation in May, will be additions to an existing 22-inch cutoff Orient Super press.

Once commissioned, the equipment will enable Hometown News to double its production speed to as much as 32,000 copies per hour and add four pages of process color on each eight-page broadsheet section, according to PHA.

Hometown News prints eight weeklies in the Spartanburg/Greenville, S.C. area. The publisher purchased its existing Super press, configured as three mono units, a 3-color unit and folder, in 1999.

Donald Wilder, HNI’s chief executive officer, said the company needed more speed and more color.

“This year we realized we needed more speed, and with more advertisers asking for 4-color we ordered the faster, jaw folder and the 4-color tower. With so many newspapers to print, currently 300,000 impressions per week compared to 60,000 in 1999, the new higher-speed arrangement will be a time and cost savings to us.”

The original folder will be included in the revised pressline to allow use of either folder as needed and to allow the line to be run as two separate presses.

More flexibility

HNI newspapers average three to four sections, but can be as large as five to six sections for special issues and during the peak Christmas advertising season.

Currently, the sections are limited to 12 pages when using three colors and a spot color. When the new tower and folder go on line, Hometown News will have the capability to print four additional pages of back-to-back process color along with the two it can produce now, for a total of six pages of process color in a 20-page section.

 Newspapers in the group include a common section as well as local sections devoted to each community so that display advertisers can advertise to as many or as few of the communities as they need to reach.

“Our advertisers know where their customers are coming from,” Wilder said. “Our philosophy is that they should not have to spend large amounts of money advertising in areas where they are unlikely to get customers. They can reduce their costs while knowing that they are getting through to their customers. We call it fishing where the fish are.”

The addition of the new equipment is also expected to help capture more outside work — business that includes printing other newspapers as well as publications, Wilder said.